Digital meets Culture

Vienna, AIT, 29 May 2015

This one-day workshop, being held on 29 May in Vienna, at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), offers the opportunity to learn how digital forensics and the use of disk images can support your digital preservation workflows. Supported by expert facilitators Cal Lee and Kam Woods from the University of North Carolina, participants will get hands-on experience using the BitCurator tools including the latest developments with BitCurator Access. The BitCurator Environment is a suite of open source digital forensics and data analysis tools to help collecting institutions (libraries, archives and museums) process and provide access to born-digital materials.

The workshop is organised by Open Preservation Foundation and addressed towards archivists, manuscript curators, librarians or others who are responsible for acquiring, transferring and/or providing access to collections of born-digital materials, particularly those that are received on removable media. It will be assumed that participants are familiar with basic digital curation issues and practices.
Though it is not mandatory, participants will ideally know how to create disk images, generate and verify cryptographic hashes of files and examine the contents of a file in a hex editor. It will also be helpful to be familiar with the role and purpose of file systems, file headers and file signatures. Knowledge of Linux command line operations will also be beneficial, but is not a necessary prerequisite for participation. The organiser will be on hand to help with tasks and many of the tools will have graphic user interfaces.

Participants will learn and get experience of the use of BitCurator environment tools, useful to support various phases of the digital curation, including pre-imaging data triage, forensic disk imaging, file system analysis and reporting, identification of private and individually identifying information, export of technical and other metadata.
They will also learn about tools (currently available but undergoing significant further development) enabling access to data from disk images and redaction of sensitive contents. Participants should leave with a practical understanding of how to apply these tools in their own institutions and with contacts of peer institutions undertaking similar work.

View the workshop agenda here.

Registration is open! For registering click here.
OPF members are invited to attend free of charge. The price for non-members is 75 Euros.

Organiser: Open Preservation Foundation

Venue: AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
Donau-City-Straße 1, 1220 Vienna, Austria

For further info visit openpreservation.org

Brussels, 5 March 2015

Second concertation meeting for on-going PCP projects

PREFORMA has been invited to the second concertation meeting for all on-going PCP projects in DG Connect, organised by the European Commission in Brussels on the 5^th of March 2015.

During this event the EC wants to give the opportunity to the attendees to network and share experiences on common issues that they face while implementing PCPs.

Taking into account that in the first concertation meeting all PCP projects already presented their project scope and planned activities, this year’s meeting will focus more on practical issues that concern the actual execution of a PCP.

The topics that will be discussed during the workshop are:

The transition from PCP to PPI
How to prepare a PCP call for tender
The link between PCP projects with other innovation policy measures (standardisation, venture capital and others)
The transition between the different phases of a PCP project

Download here the agenda of the meeting.

Cardiff, 16-20 March 2015

Procurement Week 2015

Bangor Law School is home to the Institute for Competition and Procurement Studies (ICPS). Each year they organise a National Procurement Conference in partnership with the Welsh Government. In 2015 the event will take place at the St David’s Hotel in Cardiff, Wales.

This event is attended by delegates from no fewer than 25 different countries. The attendees come from the world of business, the public sector, legal practice and academia. As part of next year’s events, on Tuesday 17th March 2015, it will be organised a ‘Game Changing Exhibition’. Innovation will be at the heart of the discussions.

PREFORMA project will be represented at the Conference through the Greek Film Centre and Riksarkivet and a poster of PREFORMA will be displayed during the whole Procurement Week.

Download here the Procurement Week 2015 programme brochure.

Download here the ‘Game Changing Exhibition and Innovation’ event brochure.

More information on the event can be found at the official website.

Vienna, 28-29 April 2015

DAVID – Final User-Test-Workshop

PREFORMA project has been invited to the final evaluation and user-test-workshop organised by the sister R&D-project DAVID (Digital AV Media Damage Prevention and Repair) in Vienna at the ORF-Centre on 28-29 April 2015.

The Workshop

During this event, the results from the DAVID project will be presented and it will be given the chance to test and evaluate those directly, discuss the test-results and the experience during the workshop with the developers and learn about the latest research-results and developments in the domain.

Both days of the workshop will start at 10:00 with general presentations and the introduction of the test-candidates; in the afternoon the evaluation-tests, discussions and further demonstrations will take place.

More information on the following “test-candidates” and the DAVID-project can be found on the DAVID project-website (http://david-preservation.eu).

Participation

The attendance to the workshop is free and also “open” in terms of timing; but since the main presentations will take place on each day in the morning-session (see above), it would be reasonable to attend at least one whole day.

To take part in the workshop, please send a short notice including name, profession, company and the preferred day(s) of attendance to christoph.bauer@orf.at or david-office@joanneum.at

Please register as soon as possible, as the number of participants is limited!

Need more information? Visit http://david-preservation.eu or send an email to christoph.bauer@orf.at!

Copenhagen, 6-8 May 2015

PREFORMA @ the Nordic Archival Conference

On 6-8 May 2015, Magnus Geber from Riksarkivet – Coordinator of the PREFORMA project – will attend the Nordic Archival Conference in Copenhagen.

PREFORMA will be presented on the first day during a pre-meeting with e-archivists and a poster will be showcased during the conference.

For more information visit the Conference website (Swedish language).

Västerås (Sweden), 2-4 June 2015

pHealth 2015 Conference

The 12th International Conference on Wearable Micro and Nano Technologies for Personalized Healht, pHealth 2015, will be arranged in Västerås, Sweden, on 2-4 June 2015.

PREFORMA will be represented by Peter Pharow from Fraunhofer IDMT, who will present the aspect of digital preservation and PREFORMA project during a session on archiving of medical and health data.

Starting in 2004, pHealth has evolved to a truly interdisciplinary event by covering technological and biomedical facilities, legal, ethical, social, and organizational requirements and impacts as well as necessary basic research for enabling advanced and future proof care paradigms. Thereby, it increasingly combines medical services with public health, prevention, social and elderly care, wellness and personal fitness to establish participatory, predictive, personalized, preventive, and effective care settings. Therefore, it has attracted scientists, developers, and practitioners from various technologies, medicine, legal affairs, politics, and administration from all over the world. It brought together health services vendor and provider institutions, payer organizations, governmental departments, academic institutions, professional bodies, but also patient and citizens representatives.

Download here the call for paper.

For further information visit the Conference website.

Cologne, 8-9 June 2015

PDF Days Europe 2015

PDF technology has now become a global standard – and one more stable and reliable than ever. Over the course of more than twenty years of committed development, this application-independent file format has become a real miracle worker. Protected by international standards, PDF is now an indispensable part of the modern business world.

Not all PDFs are created equal. Several specialized subset standards use the core PDF technology as a starting point. PDF Days Europe 2015 aims to acquaint you with both the technology behind PDF and the range of outstanding solutions that use it:

PDF/A: Archiving solutions
ZUGFeRD: E-invoicing solutions based on PDF/A
PDF/UA: Solutions for accessible documents
PDF/VT: Solutions for personalised printing
PDF/X: Pre-press solutions

The rise and rise of PDF technology has not been confined to the business world alone. PDF is playing an increasingly critical role for digital document exchange in public and scientific institutions.

Did you know that a PDF file…

… can be digitally signed?
… can include additional comments?
… can contain other files, such as Excel spreadsheets?
… can be attached to another PDF file?
… can also be accessed on your smartphone?
… now meets legal regulations?

PDF Days Europe 2015 will offer answers to IT managers, decision-makers,
ECM strategists, developers and PDF experts, and provide suggestions for optimal PDF usage.

For more information visit http://www.pdfa.org/event/pdf-days-europe-2015-2/.

Tokyo, 17-19 June 2015

1st International Conference on Advanced Imaging

We are pleased to announce that “The 1st International Conference on Advanced Imaging” will be held in June, 2015. Now the imaging technology sees a more complicated technological landscape than before: the combination of digitization and network expansion makes technology fusion a necessity. Accordingly, we need to think about how the images should be in a variety of scenes. What are the best image displaying devices in a particular scene? How do we want to share information by using images? How do we recognize images?

The imaging technology is to explore the new horizons. Its use will not be limited to conventional business scenes. The imaging technology can now provide tools to inform you in countless situations. While you are in the traffic, what image information do you get? You can also choose different information devices whether you get information personally or share it in a group of people. You can see different modes of price tags or signs in a supermarket. You can display images in different modes in your living room. The imaging technology has huge potentials, e.g., highlighting the affected part in the Region of Interest in medical imaging, and using the technology for security purposes. By studying these possible scenes, we can further improve the technology to reach a new level of sophistication, when you may be able to choose the optimal image information efficiently wherever you will be.

Your active participation in this conference is more than welcome. We hope that fruitful discussions in this conference will lead to the incubation of new imaging technologies for the future.

For more information visit http://www.isj-imaging.org/event/ICAI2015/.

Oxford, 15 July 2015

Preserving Documents Forever: when is a PDF not a PDF

The Open Preservation Foundation and Digital Preservation Coalition, with support from the European Commission and the PREFORMA project, invite members to a briefing day on preserving PDF at Oxford University on Wednesday 15th July 2015.

PDF is a ubiquitous format for publishing and sharing digital documents. It provides a useful tool for dissemination and because it is designed to ensure that the look and feel of documents does not change from one environment to the next it seems like a promising basis for the preservation of documents. But it also introduces a variety of preservation challenges for those working to preserve digital information for the long term. For example there are numerous tools to help create PDFs means many of which introduce their own subtle variations to the standard. Browsers have become increasingly tolerant of these eccentricities. That helps users in the short term but makes validation harder in the long run. How are organisations beginning to address these and other issues? What makes a PDF a PDF and how can repository managers tell the difference? And what can we do as a community to solve the PDF preservation problem? These are just some of the questions this briefing day will seek to answer.

This briefing day will include an introduction to a new initiative that aims to tackle the complexities of PDF Preservation head on. The veraPDF Consortium has been funded by the PREFORMA Project to develop a comprehensive PDF/A validation tool and policy checker. This will ultimately provide a definitive take on PDF/A compliance whilst also acting as a method of identifying PDF characteristics that pose a risk to long term preservation. Participants at the briefing day will have a chance to find out what veraPDF plans to deliver. More importantly they will also have an opportunity to contribute to its design.

The full programme is yet to be finalised but speakers will include Betsy Fanning, author of the DPC’s forthcoming 2nd edition Technology Watch Report ‘Preserving with PDF/a’, Johan van der Knijff from the National Library of the Netherlands, Carl Wilson from the Open Preservation Foundation and Ange Albertini from Google.

Priority registration is available for DPC and OPF members until the 1st July, at which point non-members will be able to register for remaining places.

Who should come?

This briefing day will interest:

Collections managers, librarians, curators, archivists in memory institutions
Repository managers in higher education and research institutions
CIOs and CTOs in organisations with commercial intellectual property
Records managers and business analysts with requirements for long-lived data or legacy systems
Vendors and developers with digital preservation and EDRMS solutions
Researchers with interests e-infrastructure and digital preservation
Developers with expertise in PDF and related document formats

How to register?

Places are strictly limited and should be booked in advance. Registration will close before the event and early booking is recommended as we expect this event will be popular. This event is sponsored by the veraPDF project so is free to attend however DPC and OPF members will have priority access to registration. To register see:
http://www.dpconline.org/events/details/95-preserving-pdfs-jul15?xref=124%3Apreservingpdfs-oxford.

OPF members should select the ‘associate member’ category when registering.

Brussels, 3-4 September 2015

PREFORMA @ SOIMA 2015: Unlocking Sound and Image Heritage

PREFORMA partners KIK-IRPA (the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Belgium), BEELD EN GELUID (the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision) and PACKED, are partners for the International Conference “SOIMA 2015: Unlocking Sound and Image Heritage” which takes places on 3& 4 September in Brussels.

This is an international conference on ensuring a safe and creative future for sound and image heritage. Twelve national and international institutions are supporting the event.

Recorded sound and images have captured our world, our lives and our imagination. Thanks to rapid advancements in social media and information technologies, it has become much easier to share and use sound and image content. Yet contrary to common perception, not all content is readily usable. Today’s knowledge on preservation and access is fragmented, often trapped in separate areas of expertise, presenting a challenge to content collectors and users.

Locked in obsolete formats and threatened by degradation and decay, nearly all of sound and image collections held by museums, archives, libraries, universities and other cultural or research repositories face the imminent threat of extinction. As a result, the world stands to lose a wealth of knowledge and information – a wealth that is crucial for conserving our cultural and natural diversity.

Is it possible to prevent this loss?

The conference will bring together professionals and policy makers with an interest in sound and image preservation by focusing on four themes: